On FyDost.

Raskolnikov is both a completely realized individual and emblematic of the condition Dostoevsky explored most extensively in the tour-de-force monologue Notes From the Underground (1864), in which the speaker is self-divided: forced to try to connect with his world, but unable to sustain integration. Philip Rahv has written: that Dostoevsky is the first novelist to have fully accepted and dramatized the principle of uncertainty or indeterminacy in the presentation of character. In terms of novelistic technique this principle manifests itself as a kind of hyperbolic suspense—suspense no longer generated merely by the traditional means and devices of fiction, though these are skillfully brought into play, but as it were by the very structure of human reality. , To take this hyperbolic suspense as a literary invention pure and simple is to fail in comprehending it; it originates rather in Dostoevsky’s acute ree awareness (self-awareness at bottom) of the problematic nature of the hit modern personality and of its tortuous efforts to stem the disintegration iy threatening it. h | tk As Rahv makes clear, all of Dostoevsky’s protagonists are marked by a é sense of “spiritual and mental self-division and self-contradiction,” in which he criminal becomes an archetype of a peculiarly modern psychological condition of alienation and self-destruction.